welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Sweeny Toddler, the demonic baby who brought lots of fun to generations of children in
the UK over a number of decades, first appeared in SHIVER AND SHAKE in 1973. I
covered the SHIVER AND SHAKE period of the strip in an old post HERE.

This time let’s retrace Sweeny’s path from SHIVER AND SHAKE to the new comic
with the clumsy title of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE.

WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE was 32 pages thick at
the time. It seems like a lot of space to fill, but Whoopee! had a strong lineup of characters as it were, and it
had to accommodate quite a few refugees from SHIVER AND SHAKE who were too
popular to be discontinued with the demise of their home comic (Frankie
Stein, Scream Inn and a few others), so re-arrangements were
inevitable and competition was tough.

Sweeny Toddler didn’t make a straightforward leap to the new comic – it had to prove
its strength by participating in a poll. The Editor selected 8 strips and invited
readers to vote in a Pick-A-Strip competition.
Most of the entrants were either WHOOPEE!’s own (presumably less successful) features
– Pop
Snorer, Little Miss Muffit, Snap Happy and The Upper Crusts and the Lazy Loafers,
or those from SHIVER AND SHAKE - The Desert Fox, Grimly Feendish and Sweeny
Toddler. This is what Sweeny’s entry looked like in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23rd November, 1974:

Results were announced in the issue cover-dated 22nd
March, 1975:

… and Sweeny Toddler proudly returned to
the spotlight a week later in the Easter issue of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER AND SHAKE
cover-dated 29th March, 1975:

It would have been interesting to see the vote count.
Perhaps it was a close call for Sweeny? Was there a chance that he would have faded
into oblivion, had the runner-up received a few more votes in its favour?..

Friday, March 25, 2016

Let’s take a look at all three Easter episodes of
Frankie Stein in WHAM! comic. Those from 1965 and 1967 editions were by Ken
Reid while the one in the middle (1966) was by someone else because Ken was too
busy with The Queen of the Seas at the time and had to give up drawing Frankie
Stein temporarily. Which is a pity because the period when Ken was substituted
by another artist coincided with Frankie’s days at Madam McAbre’s Academy for
Frustrated Freaks (or Monster Manor) inhabited by fiendish characters of all
sorts. One can only imagine how brilliant the episodes would have been, had
they been illustrated by Frankie Stein’s original artist.